Tag: Ann Cleeves

Spell the Month in Books – October 2025

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!

This month’s theme is Trick or Treat: books that you feel strongly about, whether positively or negatively.

I don’t like tricks so my books are all books I’ve enjoyed – real treats!

O is for On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill

Reginald Hill’s 17th Dalziel and Pascoe novel, set in a Yorkshire village, Dendale. Three little girls had gone missing from the village one summer. Their bodies were never found, and the best suspect, a strange lad named Benny Lightfoot, was held for a time, then released. Fifteen years later another little girl, Lorraine, aged seven went out for a walk one morning with her dog before her parents got up and didn’t return home, reviving memories of the missing children from fifteen years earlier. It was a case that has haunted Dalziel.

This book is tightly plotted with many twists that made me change my mind so many times I gave up trying to work out who the murderer was and just read for the pleasure of reading. Hill’s descriptive writing is rich and full of imagery. The main characters are fully rounded people and the supporting cast are believable personalities, often described with wry humour.

C is for The Christmas Book Hunt by Jenny Colgan.

Mirren is looking for a copy of A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, a particular one that had belonged to her Great Aunt Violet. It was a special edition, with hand-drawn plates by Aubrey Beardsley and now Great Aunt Violet, who is in hospital seriously ill would love to see the book for Christmas. I loved that book as a child, so this is what made the story irresistible for me. She went to the book town Hay-on-Wye, bookshops in Edinburgh and a secondhand bookshop in Northumberland that sounds very like Barter Books in Alnwick, my favourite bookshop. She bumps into mysterious, charming Theo, who, unbeknownst to her, is searching for the same book for reasons of his own…


T is for Tamburlaine Must Die by Louise Welsh

It was a real treat to read Tamburlaine Must Die, a short book of only 140 pages, that I read in a day. Weaving together fact and fiction and set in 1593 this is a tense, dramatic story of the last days of Christopher Marlowe, playwright, poet and spy. Accused of heresy and atheism, his death is a mystery, although conjecture and rumours abound. It has an immediacy, that drew me into the late Elizabethan world.

O is for One Dark Night by Hannah Richell

I loved the spooky, tense atmosphere and as soon as I started reading it knew I was going to enjoy this book. The settings are vividly described, the characters come across as real people, and the plot is amazing, multi- layered, with plenty of suspects for the murder and numerous twists and turns to throw me off the scent. For quite a while you don’t even know the name of the victim, who was found in the woods, called ‘Sally in the Wood’. It’s a police procedural centred on Ellie, a pupil at the private school, where her mother Rachel works as the school counsellor and her father, Ben, a detective sergeant who is on the investigation team

B is for The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

I loved this book. Barbara Kingsolver writes in such a way that I can easily visualise the scenes, beginning with the opening paragraph in which she describes a tractor tire blowing up, flinging a man up in the air and throwing him over the top of a Standard Oil sign. Taylor (originally called Marietta/Missy) grew up in rural Kentucky. She left home when she had saved enough to buy a car, an old VW. She changed her name to Taylor after the first place where she ran out of petrol, which just happened to be Taylorville. She drove on until the car broke down in the middle of nowhere, on land owned by the Cherokee tribe. And it was there at a garage that an Indian woman abandoned a baby girl in Taylor’s car – she called the baby, Turtle.

E is for Every Man For Himself by Beryl Bainbridge.

This the story of Morgan’s voyage on the Titanic, divided into four days as he tells it. It’s mainly about the young rich people as they drink and party their way across the Atlantic. Morgan is part of the crowd but he is not rich, and although he has connections, he’s a young American who has to earn his living. Day four is the day the Titanic sank. I could easily imagine what it was like to be a passenger, people rushing about the boat, trying to get on the lifeboats and being separated from friends and family. And the final scenes bring home the reality that it really was a case of every man for himself with the callous attitude towards the steerage passengers, the lack of lifeboats and the disregard of the ice warnings. And so the boat described as unsinkable, sank.

R is for Raven Black by Ann Cleeves, the first in her Shetland series, crime novels set in the Shetland Islands, to the north of mainland Scotland. This is a murder mystery investigated by Inspector Jimmy Perez.

It begins on New Year’s Eve as Magnus Tait is seeing the new year in on his own, until two teenage girls knock on his door to wish him a Happy New Year. A few days later one of the girls is found dead in the snow not far from Magnus’s house, strangled with her own scarf.

The book has a strong sense of location and a terrific atmosphere – the landscape, the sea, the weather, the circling ravens and the spectacle of Up Helly Aa (the Fire Festival), all anchor the story and bring the book to life.

Upcoming Themes

November 1: Nostalgia

December 6: Giftable – Books you would give or would like to receive as a gift

January 3, 2026: New Books – Ones you have received recently or are looking forward to reading or seeing published this year

Top Ten Tuesday: Authors (or books by authors) Who Live In My State/Country

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

The topic this week is Authors (or books by authors) Who Live In My State/Country. I live in the UK. I’ve chosen authors who live/have lived in two Counties of the UK – Northumberland, where I now live and Buckinghamshire, where I used to live. The titles marked with * are linked to my reviews and the rest to Goodreads.

Northumberland:

  • L J Ross — Holy Island – crime fiction (DCI Ryan)
  • Tricia Cresswell – The Midwife – historical fiction
  • Karen Charlton – Catching the Eagle – historical fiction*
  • Ann Cleeves – The Glass Room – crime fiction (Vera Stanhope)*
  • Mari Hannah – The Lost – crime fiction (DS Frankie Oliver and DI David Stone)

Buckinghamshire

Have you read any of them?

Top Five Tuesday:Top 5 series I will finish in 2025

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. For details of all of the latest prompts for January to March, see Meeghan’s post here.

Today the topic is Top 5 series I will finish in 2025. Which series are you planning to finish (or finish to most recent publication) in 2025?

I have many series on the go. These five crime fiction novels are just the tip of the iceberg! I’m not saying I’ll finish these series this year, but I’m hoping I’ll make some progress with them this year.

Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series. There are 25 and I’ve read 24 – just one more to read, Midnight and Blue. This is the latest book in the series, so this is the only series that I will finish this year.

Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe novels. There are 24 books in the series and I’ve read 16.

Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series. There are 28 and I’ve read 20.

Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope books. There are 11 and I’ve read 9.

Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret books – there are 75 and I’ve read 16. It’ll take me ages to finish this series – if I ever do!

Six Degrees of Separation from  Intermezzo by Sally Rooney to White Nights

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month starts with Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. I haven’t read this book, so this is the description on Amazon UK:

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

My first link is Thin Air, a novel by Michelle Paver also about two brothers. Kanchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world, had claimed many lives and no one had reached the summit. Held to be a sacred mountain, it is one of the most dangerous mountains in the world – believed to be the haunt of demons and evil spirits. An unsuccessful attempt had been made in 1907, led by Edmund Lyell, when only two men had returned. The group in 1935, led by Major Cotterell, attempted to follow the 1907 route up the south-west face. Their story is narrated by medic, Dr. Stephen Pearce, accompanying his older brother, Kits. The brothers have always been rivals and this continues as they make their way up the mountain. Things start to go wrong almost straight away and Stephen is full of foreboding.

My second link is a book that also has ‘air’ in the title – Coming Up For Air, Sarah Leipciger’s second novel. It is a beautiful novel, a story of three people living in different countries and in different times. How their stories connect is gradually revealed as the novel progresses. As the author explains at the end of the novel it is a mix of fact and fiction and has its basis in truth. There is grief and loss and despair in each story, but above all, it is about love, and the desire to live. I think Sarah Leipciger is a great storyteller. It is an inspiring book, beautifully written, which emphasises the importance of the air we breathe and the desire to live. I read this book in June 2021.

My third link is An Officer and a Spy, historical fiction by Robert Harris, another book I read in June 2021. It is a gripping book about the Dreyfus affair in 1890s France. Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish officer, was convicted of treason by passing secrets to the Germans in 1895 and sent to solitary confinement on Devil’s Island. It’s narrated by Colonel George Picquart, who became convinced that Dreyfus was innocent. Harris goes into meticulous detail in staying accurate to the actual events, but even so this is a gripping book and I was completely absorbed by it from start to finish.

My fourth link is The Count of Monte Cristo, historical fiction by Alexandre Dumas, in which the main character is also wrongly imprisoned on an island. It begins in 1815 when Edmond Dantès, a sailor, having returned to Marseilles is wrongly accused of being a Bonapartist and imprisoned in the Chateau d’If on the Isle of Monte Cristo, for fourteen years. It’s a great story, action-packed, and full of high drama and emotion. Montecristo is a real island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, part of the Tuscan Archipelago, and administered by the municipality of Portoferraio in the province of Livorno.

So My fifth link is also set on a real island, that of the isolated island of Elliðaey off the coast of Iceland in Ragnar Jónasson’s novel The Island, a murder mystery with elements of horror. Four friends visit the island ten years after the murder of a fifth friend, Katla, but only three of them return. One of them, Klara, fell to her death from a cliff – but did she jump or was she pushed? Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir is sent to investigate. A suspect had been charged, but had committed suicide before the verdict was announced and the case had been closed. But are the two murders connected, even though they are ten years apart? This book is the second in Jónasson’s Hidden Iceland series.

My final link is also the second book in a series, that is White Nights by Ann Cleeve, the second in her Shetland Quartet, featuring Detective Jimmy Perez. It’s set mainly in the village of Biddista, when Kenny Thomson finds a man’s body hanging in the hut where the boat owners of the village keep their lines and pots. At first it looks as though the man, his face covered by a clown’s mask, has committed suicide, but he’d been dead before he was strung up. As well as the mystery of who killed the man in the clown mask and why, there is also the disappearance 15 years earlier of Kenny’s older brother Lawrence. It was thought that he left the island after Bella had broken his heart. Kenny hadn’t heard from him since and at first thought the dead man could be him.

The books in my chain are mainly a mix of crime and historical fiction. And the chain has become a circle with the last book connecting to the starting book and the first book, all containing two brothers.

What is in your chain, I wonder?

Next month (December 7, 2024), we’ll start with a beach read – Sandwich by Catherine Newman.

Six Degrees of Separation from  Long Island by Colm Tóibín to Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter

Published on by Margaret17 Comments

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month starts  with ColmTóibín’s Long Island, the sequel to Brooklyn. I haven’t read this book, so this is the description on Amazon UK:

A man with an Irish accent knocks on Eilis Fiorello’s door on Long Island and in that moment everything changes. Eilis and Tony have built a secure, happy life here since leaving Brooklyn – perhaps a little stifled by the in-laws so close, but twenty years married and with two children looking towards a good future.

And yet this stranger will reveal something that will make Eilis question the life she has created. For the first time in years she suddenly feels very far from home and the revelation will see her turn towards Ireland once again. Back to her mother. Back to the town and the people she had chosen to leave behind. Did she make the wrong choice marrying Tony all those years ago? Is it too late now to take a different path?

My first link is from the word ‘Island‘ in 100 Days on Holy Island by Peter Mortimer. The island is also known as Lindisfarne. This sense of being an outsider pervades the book. He always felt an ‘outsider’, not accepted by the locals. He wasn’t there as a tourist, nor had he gone to settle there, but he went with the intention of seeing how he coped with living there  for one hundred days and writing about it.

My second link is The Rising Tide by Ann Cleeves, the 10th Vera Stanhope mystery novel. It’s set on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne a tidal island just off the coast of Northumberland, only accessible across a causeway when the tide is out. DCI Vera Stanhope and her team investigate the death of Rick Kelsall who was discovered hanged from the rafters of his small bedroom on Holy Island. He is one of a group of friends who have met for a reunion each year on the island for the past fifty years

My third link is another book with the word ‘tide‘ in the title – A Dark and Twisted Tide by Sharon Bolton. This is such a terrifying novel, particularly if like me, you have a fear of drowning. Police Constable Lacey Flint thinks she’s safe. Living on the river, she’s never been happier. Until she finds a body floating on the surface, as she wild-swims in the Thames.

My fourth link is The Marlow Club Murder by Robert Thorogood a ‘cosy’ murder mystery. Seventy-seven year old Judith Potts is happy with her life, living in an Arts and Crafts mansion on the River Thames, although there are hints that there is something in her past she wants to forget. It’s the height of summer, in the grip of a heatwave, and Judith decides to take all her clothes off and go for swim in the Thames. She was enjoying herself when she hears a shout from her neighbour’s house on the opposite riverbank, followed by a gunshot. Later, when she goes to investigate, she finds him, dead in the river, with a bullet hole in the centre of his forehead. Judith is a crossword compiler, who writes cryptic clues.

So My fifth link is Puzzled: Secrets and Clues from a Life in Words by David Astle, a real life cryptic crossword compiler, a Melbourne-based writer of non-fiction, fiction and drama. He co-hosts Letters and Numbers (the Australian version of Countdown) as the dictionary expert, and his crosswords appear in Australian papers The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Beginning with a Master Puzzle, he leads us through each of the clues, chapter by chapter, revealing the secrets of anagrams, double meanings, manipulations, spoonerisms and hybrid clues. More than a how-to manual and more than a memoir, Puzzled is a book for word junkies everywhere.

My final link is Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter the second book in the Inspector Morse books. Inspector Morse is perplexed when a letter of reassurance arrives from young Valerie Taylor, missing for more than two years and presumed dead, in a case that takes a bizarre turn when a mysterious body turns up. This book, like all of Dexter’s books, is a most complicated mystery, one of the ‘puzzle’ types. Dexter, himself, constructed crossword puzzles and made Morse a crossword aficionado. Morse is puzzled by this case, his brain seething in ceaseless turmoil, until he realised that if he shuffled the suspects and possibilities like the letters in an anagram the answer would come to him.

The books in my chain are a mix of crime fiction novels, and non fiction (Puzzled and 100 Days on Holy island). What is in your chain, I wonder?

Next month (November 2, 2024), we’ll start with Sally Rooney’s latest release, Intermezzo.

Six Degrees of Separation from Kairos to The One I Was: July 2024

Published on by Margaret14 Comments

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month starts with Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck. Kairos is the winner of the International Booker Prize 2024. An intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history. Translated from German by Michael Hofmann.

Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.

My first link is another novel translated from German, Perfume:the story of a murderer by Patrick Süskind, translated from German by John E Woods. It is an extraordinary novel, a Gothic work in the vein of Edgar Allen Poe, or Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey. It depicts the strange life of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille and is a book of smells. This is a horror story, one that made me not want to read it and yet also want to read it to the bitter end.

My second link is Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe, which is a collection of Poe’s best stories containing all the terrifying and bewildering tales that characterise his work. As well as the Gothic horror of such famous stories as ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Premature Burial’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, all of Poe’s Auguste Dupin stories are included.

These are the first modern detective stories and include ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’.

My third link stays on the theme of tales of horror with Tales of Terror by Robert Louis Stevenson, which are published in my copy of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It consists of two short stories, both written for the Christmas “crawler” tradition in 1884 and 1885. Christmas was a season traditionally associated with supernatural and creepy tales. The Body Snatcher is very much a traditional Christmas ghost story, beginning with four men gathered in an inn on a dark winter’s night telling tales round the fireside of grisly deeds. The other story is Olalla, a Gothic tale, set in an ancient Spanish castle surrounded by deep woodland, about a young man recovering from his war wounds and to “renew his blood”, who finds himself living with a strange family.

My fourth link moves away from horror stories to crime fiction, linked by the word ‘tales’ in the title. It is Telling Tales by Ann Cleeves, a book I have read but I didn’t write a review. It’s the 2nd of her Vera Stanhope series in which the residents of an East Yorkshire village are revisited with the nightmare of a murder that happened 10 years before. There was some doubt about the guilty verdict passed on Jeanie Long and now it would seem that the killer is still at large. Inspector Vera Stanhope builds up a picture of a community afraid of itself and of outsiders.

My fifth link is On Beulah Height, Reginald Hill’s 17th Dalziel and Pascoe novel. It’s also set in a Yorkshire village, Dendale. Three little girls had gone missing from the village one summer. Their bodies were never found, and the best suspect, a strange lad named Benny Lightfoot, was held for a time, then released. Fifteen years later another little girl, Lorraine, aged seven went out for a walk one morning with her dog before her parents got up and didn’t return home, reviving memories of the missing children from fifteen years earlier.

My final link is to a another book featuring a character called Benny – The One I Was by Eliza Graham – historical fiction split between the present and the past following the lives of Benny Gault and Rosamund Hunter. Benny first came to Fairfleet in 1939, having fled Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport train. As an adult he bought the house and now he is dying of cancer. Rosamund returns to Fairfleet, her childhood home, to nurse Benny. I was totally engrossed in both their life stories as the various strands of the story eventually combined.

Half of my chain consists of horror stories, not a genre I often read and the other half is made up of crime fiction novels, as usual.

Next month (August 3, 2024), we’ll start with  The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose (Kate’s pick was inspired by Sue’s recent post about writers and artists).